Egg camouflage evolution tests in different nest sites

I’ve spent some time testing Project Nightjar EggLab: clicking on algorithmically generated eggs on backgrounds taken from nightjar nest sites and recording the time it takes for each egg. It’s designed for lots of people to play in parallel, but I wanted to test it before coming up with more gameplay mechanic ideas.

The timing is used to rank the eggs, I keep the top 1024 individuals that took longest to find, and generate new ones from them. The idea is that successful traits will increase throughout the population and the average score will increase – from this small test it seems to be the case, a slow but consistent rise over the latest 500 eggs:

Most of the eggs are still really easy to see, but some of them take a few seconds and every now and again there is a good one that can take longer. These are some nest sites from the fiery-necked nightjar, which seems to consistently favour leafy ground – the last one took me a while to spot:

This are the top 50 eggs for the fiery-necked population, it’s quite noisy with false positives due to the fact that if you get distracted when playing the egg will score highly (this is one of the things to fix):

For comparison, here is the top 50 for the Mozambique nightjar:

These birds nest on a bigger variety of sites, including bare earth – here’s a good one of them: